Sunday, December 30, 2012

Now
that the Oscar-bait movies are mostly released in October and November, the
Christmas season isn’t quite the pressure-cooker it used to be. I went once
each on the 23rd, 25th, 26th, 30th,
31st and January 2nd, which is actually a very light
schedule (to pad it out I also watched seven movies on DVD or video over the
same period). Now admittedly I didn’t see Cheaper
by the Dozen 2, so maybe I stole two hours there from a deserving
experience.

Anyway,
these are all pretty easy movies to watch and write about, and they may not
have loomed as heavily in my mind as my yearlong ambition to listen at least
once to every track on my ipod. All year long, I had very diligently avoided
listening even to my favourite old tracks more than once, obsessed with
spreading my patronage evenly. I knew I wasn’t going to make it, but I avoided scrolling through the menu until time had run out, on the evening of the 31st,
at which point I discovered I had 132 albums on there that had gone
unlistened-to in their entirety. This seems to me to say more about the
futility of man’s quest in the universe than any amount of natural disaster and
existential illumination. And you should see my reading pile…

Fun with Dick and Jane

Fun with Dick and Jane seems at times like it might have a coherent reason for remaking
the 1977 Ted Kotcheff comedy (which starred George Segal and Jane Fonda) – any
movie that leads off its end credits with a roll call of the main culprits in
Enron, WorldCom etc. clearly has something on its mind. And for the first half
hour, the film’s portrayal of a couple’s overextended lifestyle brought down by
corporate malfeasance and its resulting economic devastation, although
superficial in its references and analysis, makes for reasonable satire. Then,
at their lowest ebb, they decide to turn to crime, and the movie becomes
weirdly sketchy and slapdash, before regrouping for a moderately well executed
turn-the-tables finale. Maybe this is purely subjective, but Tea Leoni (who,
apropos of nothing, I just discovered was born on exactly the same day as I was
– cool!) seems too intelligent for her role, whereas Jim Carrey has something
like the opposite problem – his patented mugging hardly makes sense for this
material, and the film seems to tie itself into a knot to accommodate him. I
don’t remember the original very well, but it seems to me to have been quite a
bit more effortlessly resonant than this one, but then that’s true of virtually
any mainstream movie comparison spanning the three decades. Anyway, I’ve
certainly seen worse, if that’s worth anything.

Transamerica, directed by Duncan Tucker, comes close at times to a one-woman
show – she’s Felicity Huffman, playing a man on the verge of a sex-change
operation into a woman. Huffman brilliantly conveys this transitional state,
and nails the character’s overly strenuous delicacy; the twist is that her
physical issues are ultimately less definitive than her unresolved emotional
and familial loose ends. The greatest of these loose ends is a teenage son
she’s never met; they’re now thrown together through a rather strained set-up
and embark on a road-trip to Los Angeles, where he aspires to star in porno
movies. Much of the material sags, with familiar set-ups, revelations and
reversals, until they reach Huffman’s parents (played, in a one of the year’s
most wackily inspired casting flourishes, by Fionnula Flanagan and Burt Young)
and things become more broadly comic. The ending is sentimental, but preserves
the movie’s commendable if calculated openness toward diversity and breadth of
lifestyles. As what we might call Sundance-friendly movies go, this is on the
high end of the quality scale, but it owes Huffman almost everything.

Rumor Has It

Rumor Has It started filming with its writer Ted Griffin as a first-time
director; he was fired early on, and seasoned smoothie Rob Reiner stepped in to
save the day. He delivers a lush, deliberately paced film, but this approach
seems at odds with the inherently rather perverse material, in which a young
woman finds out that The Graduate was
based on her own mother and grandmother, and then ends up sleeping with the man
who slept with both of them. The film
starts Jennifer Aniston, in her patented so-so manner, and also Kevin Costner
and Shirley Maclaine, both of whom are quite good, but don’t seem subject to
any logical overall strategy. The movie lumbers through contrivances and
implausibilities galore, all of which would be forgiven if it had sufficient
screwball energy to blast past them. As the current crop of comedies goes, it’s
sadly no Fun with Dick and Jane.

Mrs.
Henderson Presents, directed by
Stephen Frears, is about an upper-class battleaxe in 30’s London who buys a
theatre after being widowed, puts the bums in the seats by presenting naked
women (within the law as long as they don’t move an inch, this being deemed the
difference between titillation and artistic display), and then fights to keep
the show going during WW2. It’s a very tightly constructed, efficient film,
although the greater part of that efficiency is simply in how it lobs softballs
to Judi Dench. She gets to deliver an array of naughty words, put the men in
their place, wear a bear suit…at one point she even seems on the verge of doing
a nude scene, but we’re thankfully spared that (no such luck though for her
co-star Bob Hoskins, as the long-suffering – could it be otherwise? – theatre
manager). It’s all a true story, but that doesn’t make the movie any nuttier;
and it’s so well calculated and poised that it ends up feeling a bit airless.
The relatively unknown Kelly Reilly, as the most alluring of the nudes,
eclipses her famous co-stars by giving a performance of excessive depth and
subtlety.

Casanova

Casanova is an unusually breezy effort from Lasse Hallstrom, the
accomplished but helplessly dull craftsman behind The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.
In a stunning contrast to his role in Brokeback
Mountain, Heath Ledger plays the Venetian lover, caught up here in a silly
plot of Papal inquiries, mistaken identities, subterfuge, swordplay and chase
scenes, revolving around his infatuation with a woman (Sienna Miller) whose
progressive ideas of female empowerment put him beyond the pale…until, of
course, he isn’t. Venice looks occasionally digitally enhanced but still
ravishing, and the movie deftly pitches itself just the right side of slapstick
(for example, there’s lots of falling over, and Oliver Platt smeared in lard).
As an evocation of the real Casanova I imagine it’s an utter travesty, but all
I can say is it hit the spot for me.

In a
recent interview, British director Michael Apted described the genesis of the
“Up” series of documentaries: “It was a one-off film. It was
a rather a brilliant idea by people who were running a show called World in
Action, of having a look at the English class system in 1964 by just
getting a group of (fourteen) seven-year-old children from different social
backgrounds and asking them questions, rather than getting politicians or
economists.” A few years later, someone had the idea of revisiting the children
at the age of fourteen, and thus a major portion of Apted’s professional
identity was already in place as he took the whole thing on from there (he’s
also directed many fiction films, including Coal
Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist).
The eighth installment, 56 Up, is
showing at the Bloor Hot Docs cinema as I write: if you miss it there, it’ll no
doubt be available soon in other formats.

History of England

Remarkably, all but one of the
fourteen are still with the project, although a few of them skipped some of the
intervening years (ironically, and to Apted’s expressed annoyance, the one remaining
hold-out is himself a documentary producer). The format never changes – each
participant gets around ten minutes, blending snippets of previous encounters
with new footage and conversations. Each segment calmly blends work and family,
achievements and regrets, fears and anticipations. Much of the appeal flows
from theworld’s-slowest-cliffhanger
quality – will this seemingly shaky marriage have lasted; will this precarious
financial situation stabilize; most viscerally, how much worse will everyone
look after another seven years on the tires? As always, the new edition covers
all of this as faithfully as any edition of a proven franchise should.

It’s hard to conclude on the
series’ relative importance as more than that. Apted says: “…what’s interesting about it,
it is the history of England. I’ve always avoided being very specifically
political, actually talking about political events of the time because somehow
it seems to date it. But…you’re telling a part of British history, of social
history. And I think that’s kind of what’s powerful about it. It’s telling the
history of the country through character, through people and not through ideas,
not through polemic, not through whatever. But… their lives stand for a lot of
political ideas..” In the new edition, this evidences itself most directly
through a recurring worry about the state of the country – several participants
refer to government cutbacks, or the increasing difficulty of making ends meet
– and about the prospects for their kids (all but two of the fourteen I think,
even those in relatively more modest occupations, own their own pleasant-looking
homes, something that’s becoming almost impossible for young people in Britain
now).

Social research

The
children were drawn from across the social spectrum (although the times being
what they were, they were heavily weighted toward white males), and a large
part of the subtext has always hinged on class-based predestination: each
edition closes by positing provocatively: Give me a child until he is seven
and I will give you the man.
In the new film, one of the more successful participants, a barrister (just as
he predicted from the start), criticizes this premise, pointing out his father
died when he was nine and he needed a scholarship to get into Oxford. But this
can’t overcome the almost eerie confidence of that seven year-old, nor the fact
that the other “upper-class” boy in the bunch was also already planning a
career in the law, and also achieved exactly that (the one more highly-sourced girl
in the group never had a career, but she married well). By comparison, the less
privileged children went through the more typical process of grabbing at dreams
which never transpired, experiencing a more chaotic, inconsistent momentum. And
although the group as a whole seems to have experienced a roughly typical
proportion of divorce, none of it happened to that higher echelon (at least as
far as we can tell – one of the segments is oddly coy on the matter).

But
of course, anything I might say along these lines is limited by the obvious
objection that a sample of fourteen people, limited to ten minutes or so each,
doesn’t have any statistical validity as a basis for drawing wider conclusions.
In the Star, Peter Howell called the
series “a valuable contribution to social research,” but I can’t imagine any
serious social researcher would get anything significant out of it. And then bizarrely
undercutting that judgment, he complains elsewhere in his review that “what they’re doing isn’t all that interesting, especially
in this Internet age when all the world’s a stage. Much more colourful
characters are just a mouse click away on YouTube.” His implication, I guess,
is that unless you’re a dedicated social researcher, and thus conditioned to
tedium, you’re better off watching people train their dogs to dance.

Rorschach test

Still, Howell does clumsily
get at something intriguing, that maybe the series is best appreciated as a
vast one-of-a-kind, serendipitous art project, and its primary virtues are
aesthetic rather than sociological, teasing us to connect as best we can (which
might be not at all) based on our own backgrounds and experiences (it’s no
surprise that if I had to choose, I identify most closely with the kid from a
remote Northern village who now lives in America, not that our lives are very
similar beyond that). Maybe almost any reaction to the work as Apted organizes
it is as valid as any other. If I
comment that I’ve perhaps never seen a film containing so many fleshy upper
arms, is that frivolous and reductive, or a legitimate example of one of many
interlocking ripples and patterns?

And yet, the film does have
moments which pierce, not just in themselves, but as an apparent trace of
broader experience. One of the lawyers married a woman who stayed at home to
bring up the children, but they’ve grown now, and she talks about the lack of
anything to do, but that it’ s too late to change that; her husband gently
suggests that’s more about her lack of self-confidence. You suddenly feel, all
the more keenly because it’s so understated, the vast aridity of her life,
spreading over day after day when he’s away, far removed from real-world problems
(their vast marvel of a lawn produced gasps from the audience when I saw the
film), but all the more marooned because of it. Objectively, I suppose her
situation is still more desirable than that of many of the other women, but
maybe I’m only saying that – going back to the inevitable subjectivity of
responses - because I’m more capable of imagining comfortable desolation than I
am of appreciating life on the edge. Maybe Apted’s series is largely a
historical Rorschach test, but then, it often takes much greater time and
distance for history to reliably become more than that.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2008)I’ve been lucky enough to see Stephen
Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber
of Fleet Street twice on stage, most recently just a couple of months ago.
At the risk of over-reacting to recent experiences, I think that second
production will stand in my memory as one of the most overwhelming live
experiences I’ve witnessed. Director John Doyle comprehensively reimagined the
material so that the actors also play all the instruments, generating a unique
theatrical rush. I would need to see it several times more to fully appreciate
how the production’s incredible technical sophistication nevertheless managed
(against the starkest of sets) to create such a darkly vivid evocation of the
fictional space; sadly, it’s long gone now, so I can only hope my memory is a
good custodian of it.

Sweeney
Todd

The new film version, directed by Tim
Burton, obviously doesn’t take the same approach at all, and I admit I had some
trepidation about the choice of director. But it turns out better than we could
likely have expected: not in the John Doyle class, but a more than honorable
recording for posterity. If you don’t know, Sondheim’s musical (so grim that it
spooked many of the audience members around us when we saw it on stage) is the
story of that murderous barber Todd, returning to 19th century
London from a prison sentence imposed by a corrupt judge, and hell-bent on
revenge. His collaborator, Mrs. Lovett, is the self-proclaimed baker of “the
worst pies in London,” who sees an opportunity to spice up her ingredients as
Sweeney starts to rack up the body count (what would one do with fresh meat
otherwise?)

The film is about half an hour shorter
than the stage version, but it’s the most careful and well-judged pruning job
imaginable, leaving Sondheim’s work substantially intact. Burton matches this
with an extraordinarily restrained approach that brings out all the material’s
morose intensity – there are only a few moments when the camera slips its tight
leash. The lead roles are played by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, risky
in that neither is a trained singer, and they’re both younger (or at least seem
like it) than normal for these roles. This too ultimately works out
terrifically. Made up to look almost like brother and sister, both with one foot
in Addams Family territory, they bring to it an undertone of blinded
vulnerability. One misses the relish that some of the songs had on stage, but
even when you don’t completely like Burton’s choices here, you can respect the
scrupulousness behind them.

I’d say this is the best filmed stage
musical of the last few years. Rent
and The Producers were emptily headed
literal transcriptions, whereas Chicago
and Dreamgirls were fussy and
overdone. None of the four was slightly interesting as a piece of cinema. Burton’s
on the other hand is diverting right down to the texture of the (copious)
blood, which reminded me of Jean-Luc Godard’s remark about the blood in Pierrot le Fou being “not blood, but
red.” There are few movies where you more clearly register the rare appearances
of yellow, or bright blue; and when they do appear, they represent dreams just
waiting to be quashed.

Sweeney
Todd has some
of the most beautiful songs I know – Pretty
Women and Not While I’m Around,
for example – and gains much of its unique tension from the extreme thematic
pressure that’s placed on these sentiments (if you’ve only heard Pretty Women out of context, on Barbra
Streisand’s Broadway Album for
example, it’s impossible to imagine the circumstances under which it’s sung). I
never thought Burton would stick so close to the playbook on all these; if you
love the material, you can’t help but feel considerable gratitude.

The
Bucket List

And now we travel over to the other side
of the quality spectrum, not quite all the way over, but far enough into the
gloom that the sophistication of a Tim Burton seems like something yet to be
invented. In this zone that time forgot, we find Rob Reiner’s new film The Bucket List, appropriately named in
that Reiner directs pretty much as if loading up a bucket. Yeah, I imagine him
saying, just put the camera over there somewhere; light it any way you like
guys; Jack, that was great; Morgan, that was great; time for lunch yet?

The movie’s selling point is the bringing
together of two screen icons (not that I imagine anyone felt deprived by it not
having happened earlier): Nicholson and Freeman, playing two terminal cancer
patients, one an unfulfilled multi-millionaire (is there any other kind in such
movies?), the other a family man who let his dreams get away. Fusing
Nicholson’s cash and Freeman’s positive attitude, they construct a list of
things to do before they die (or kick the bucket, as the title has it), ranging
from skydiving to visiting the Pyramids, to some simpler but less easily attained
loose ends.

It’s a crazily old-fashioned thing, not
least of all in the assumption on how little it takes to entertain an audience;
it’s been a while since I came across such slack, under-developed material.
Early on, their sorry circumstances are moderately affecting in a Hollywood
kind of way, but once they start driving around racetracks and climbing the
Himalayas (and in this regard at least the technicians did all they could to
sell the illusion, although it was a hopeless task), it quickly becomes a silly
bore. The closing scenes in particular play as if Reiner had given up and gone
home, and it’s debatable how fully the two stars ever showed up in the first
place. As Godard might have said, it is not blood in the bucket, but brown.

Juno

The new kings of comedy are of course the
ubiquitous (and to my mind overrated) Judd Apatow and now the makers of Juno, which has been conquering every
critic and box office in its path. The biggest beneficiaries are screenwriter
Diablo Cody and lead actress Ellen Page. Cody’s dialogue is so consistently
strange and sparky that it’s like watching a dramatized guidebook to a whole
new subculture. Page handles it with a fast-talking ease evoking a modern Jean
Arthur or Irene Dunne. It makes for an extremely diverting movie.

There’s some subtle and rather moving
plotting in there too, revolving around a feisty teenager, pregnant from her
one sexual encounter with her boyfriend (Michael Cera) who decides to give the
baby up for adoption to a yuppie couple (Jennifer Garner is also very fine, in
a more traditional vein, as the wife). Unlike many, I don’t see Juno as one of the year’s best – it
doesn’t achieve the artistic alchemy of amounting to more than the sum of its
parts. But they’re very astute and classy parts, and the movie never postures
in the vein of (say) Wes Anderson’s horrible The Darjeeling Limited. I will say though that “This is one doodle
that can’t be undid, homeskillet” is just about my least favourite line of the
year, and should have been given the razor.

I didn’t cover the territory thoroughly enough to extend an
opinion on the year’s ten best films, but here are ten I admired very much.
Happy holidays!

Compliance (Craig Zobel)

In this terrifically executed provocation, a manager at an
Ohio fast food outlet is manipulated into detaining an employee on suspicion of
theft, not suspecting that the unseen police officer on the other end of the
line is just a sick prankster, exploiting inherent human gullibility and
submissiveness. It works well enough as an effectively creepy thriller, but
Zobel’s real intent is to position the film more
as a social phenomenon (one based closely on documented real-life cases), with
almost limitless metaphorical potential, broadly speaking to a wider capitulation
in America culture.

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)

Stillman’s first film in fourteen years seems to evidence
his regret at the time he’s lost, underneath a proud and slightly cranky
defiance. It takes place on a college campus, in more or less the present day,
with hardly a person over thirty in the mix: for a director who’s somehow found
himself hitting sixty, that might be viewed as charming and progressive, or as
a sign of denial. The film is considerably strange, and – let’s say – distant from
the pressing issues of our times; although I don’t think it’s as strong as his
previous works, I was just damn happy to have him back.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)

David Cronenberg’s A
Dangerous Method – depicting some episodes from the birth of
psychoanalysis, and the souring of the relationship between Freud and Jung -
superficially seems like an anomalous project for him, even for the more
“respectable” latter day Cronenberg, but on greater reflection it might be the
masterpiece he’s been inching toward for almost forty years: astonishingly
tightly controlled and one of the most gripping films of ideas in a long time.
It’s thrillingly complex and overflowing with implication and nuance,
ultimately surveying a battle over the creation of meaning, taking place at a
time when the world was up for grabs.

The Deep Blue
Sea (Terence
Davies)

Davies’ first narrative feature film since 2000, set in the
early fifties, focuses with intense compassion on a woman (mesmerizingly played
by Rachel Weisz) who’s left her husband, a senior judge and knight of the
realm, to live in threadbare circumstances with her lover, despite knowing he
doesn’t truly return her feelings; at the same time, Davies is also preoccupied
more broadly with post-WW2 dissatisfaction and displacement. Throughout the
film, in a way that’s rare now, you feel a vital guiding presence alongside the
camera, totally immersed in the act of creation, working closely and humanely
with his collaborators.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

The most necessary film I saw this year, even if it’s born
out of a melancholy skepticism that we’re entering a time when little or
nothing about cinema will reach that bar. It follows Mr. Oscar, played by Denis
Lavant, as he’s driven around Paris in a white stretch limo on a series of
mysterious appointments, each of which involves assuming a different character
and – in general terms - enacting a “scene.” The film has the death
of cinema written all over it – Carax has barely been able to work in the last
twenty years (triumphant returns after long absences are obviously a feature of
this list) - but as he stares into the jaws of apathy and defeat, he finds
scintillating proof of life, creating more exhilarating moments than you can
process.

The Master (Paul Anderson)

The range
of responses to Anderson’s fascinating and rewarding film – loosely inspired by
the origins of Scientology, and more broadly by America’s post-war confusions
and its long history of homegrown religions and cults, sexual gurus and
motivational speakers - was unusually stimulating, often hailing it as a
masterpiece while leaving it unclear what people actually admired. Indeed,
Anderson has crafted a kind of metaphysical quicksand, in which it’s hard to
distinguish truth from lies, dreams from reality, black from white; in part
though, it seems to me about the firming up of the modern concept of ego, in
all its deluded, decaying hypocrisy.

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

In the
past, I’ve said that Anderson’s familiar style “has the effect of draining the flavour
from everything he looks at,” but I don’t feel that way anymore – maybe because
of his ever more exquisite skill at refining his invented environments, or
maybe because of reflecting on how much cinema owes to its dreamers. In this
jewel of a movie, carrying a rather moving sense of melancholy and regret, an
orphaned pre-teen boy runs away from his scout group to hike across some old
Indian trails with his soul mate, various scouts and adults on their trail. You
wouldn’t want to change a single frame of it.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Ceylan’s
deliberately paced saga of a police investigation – built around a witness
who’s confessed to burying a body but is then unable to find it – sometimes
feels early on like it might just end up in the middle of the arty “slow
cinema” pack, but it pays off strongly with an unpredictable and strangely
satisfying final act, one which actually makes something of the somewhat
over-familiar theme of the arbitrariness of fate, of how reality and
storytelling become intertwined. Along the way the film packs in a huge amount
of local information, sensitizing us both to the sustaining and transient
aspects of community.

Take this Waltz (Sarah
Polley)

I was very surprised how Polley’s Toronto-set chronicle of a
marriage and a love affair played in my mind afterwards. It seems to me an
astonishing advance from her previous film Away
with Her – like comparing a short story to a big overflowing, sensuous
mixed-media narrative installation. There’s a risk in there too, that at times
the film starts to seem like a series of evasions -for example, at the main points where anger
seems warranted, Polley cuts around it, or looks away. But how often,
Cronenberg aside, does a Canadian filmmaker even demand to be gently critiqued
in the highest terms?

Weekend (Andrew Haigh)

Haigh’s film didn’t even open
here, to our city’s shame, but it’s available on DVD. It’s a British film about
a short-lived love affair between two men, carried
along by terrific, unforced interactions and observations, not to mention large
quantities of sex and drug-taking. It might at various points be seen as a
modern gloss on David Lean’s Brief
Encounter, even including the use of a railway station as a defining
location, but to the extent it has its contrivances, they’re deployed here for
radically different purposes than we’re used to, to examine how being gay
continues to demand a degree of conscious self-examination and positioning that
being straight, the default state, just doesn’t.

I wish I knew more about what
film editors do. I have a basic sense of what the job involves, and I’ve read
enough stories of potential disasters rescued in the editing suite to broadly understand
its centrality to the filmmaking process. Some of these stories suggest that
once in a while, the editor might be a truer author of a film than its credited
director. In others though, it seems that the editor plays more of a technical
support role. This may be no more than the variation you see in any walk of
life – in my own workplace, for example, some managers use their administrative
assistants for everything under the sun, while others are more self-sufficient and
barely need them at all. But for me at least, cinema makes such things
inherently more mysterious and beguiling.

Thelma Schoonmaker

This year’s Oscar for editing
went to Thelma Schoonmaker for The
Aviator. The other nominees were Ray,
Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland and Collateral. Four of those five were also nominated for best film,
suggesting that high-quality editing is somehow undistinguishable from
high-quality work overall (the one substitution, Collateral for Sideways,
puts a high-functioning machine, something that feels clearly “assembled,” over
a quieter, more invisibly flowing work). In case this seems like a fluke, last
year was a three out of five correlation. But if the best film is the work that
best reflects the “overall” achievement of its many makers, this suggests that
good editing is merely a proxy for good overall achievement. On the other hand,
the five initial nominees are selected by the Academy’s editors’ branch, and
they (if anyone can) should be able to figure out strong individual work when
they see it. Or are the nominations influenced by individual popularity,
affability, and other extraneous factors?

When Schoonmaker accepted her
award, she thanked the film’s director Martin Scorsese and said he made her
work easy because “You think like an editor when you shoot.” Meaning, I think,
that Scorsese doesn’t just shoot every angle that occurs to him and dump
endless cans of film on her desk with no idea of how they should be assembled –
on the set, he has a sense in his head of how the finished creation will look.
Presumably, with his legendary efficiency, Clint Eastwood is much the same. To
us outsiders it might seem weird that anyone would do it any differently, that
this degree of economy and coordination wouldn’t be a minimum requirement for
the job. But if it were, then Scorsese wouldn’t stand out for it. John Ford was
famous for doing the same thing, and I’ve seen that described as his way of
thwarting the studios’ meddling tendencies. Alfred Hitchcock was so famously
confident about how sequences would translate to the screen that he dirccted
the odd scene from the back of his car. Other directors grab lots of “coverage”
from multiple angles, figuring that they’ll find the scene in the editing room.
I’m sure that both these approaches may at times yield either masterpieces or
duds, but the Ford/Scorsese approach seems (at least superficially) to speak of
greater command.

Andre Bazin

Some
schools of film theory see editing as an intrusion that prevents film from
attaining its potential as a realistic medium. This way of thinking places its
greatest value on the single shot, and the use of camera movement and focus to
create complexity of relationships and meaning within the frame. Andre Bazin
noted that editing creates "a meaning not
objectively present in the images but derived purely from their juxtaposition”;
he took the opinion that the film image should be evaluated "according not
to what it adds to reality but to what it reveals of it." In Bazin’s case
this view bore an ideological spirituality, rooted in the French
tradition of Personalism and its emphasis on spiritual
fulfillment and an integrated harmonious universe.

Even
now I find long takes incredibly exciting, although if anything, it works
against the ideology I described - by drawing attention to its coordinated
prowess, it can actually seem more manipulative of reality than a
“conventionally” edited sequence. I expect this only illustrates the fallacy of
thinking about film as a realistic medium in the first place. Of course, it
looks realistic – those are real people up there, caught in actions that they
once really carried out. But with the choice to film one person rather than
another, to choose one angle rather than another, aesthetic subjectivity
enters, and if we think it is ever vanquished, I think that merely reflects the
power of certain conventions. Bazin acknowledged this in other writings, stating
"realism in art can only be achieved in one way
- through artifice."

Conventional notions of great
editing tend to emphasize the sweat factor. Collateral
and City of God are both logistical
challenges, with numerous complex set pieces and narrative balls kept up in the
air. The editing Oscar often goes to a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star
Wars, reflecting a view that editing something sprawling and fast-moving
must be much harder than editing something small and deliberate. And yet this
seems to undervalue the small epiphanies that come from intimacies. Needless to
say, no Jean-Luc Godard film or other piece of radical montage has ever been
nominated for the editing Oscar, and yet these may be (almost self-evidently)
more imaginative and challenging uses of the medium’s building blocks than even
a well-made drama. I suppose the Academy would say that the Godard style of
editing, privileging meaning and stimulation over tidiness and unobtrusive
flow, is simply a different kind of ball game.

Annie Hall

And yet there’s something
almost paradigmatically thrilling about the idea of creating meaning and
resonance out of pieces of film bearing no inherent relationship to one
another. There’s no doubt that the moment in 2001: a Space Odyssey, when the film cuts from the primitive man’s
bone thrown into the air, to a spaceship thousands of years later, is Kubrick’s
conception rather than his editor’s, and it can be regarded as pretentious or
strenuous. But it sums up cinema’s astonishing reach.

Ultimately though, the
difference between good and bad editing though may come down to much less than
that. In his terrifically entertaining memoir When the Shooting Stops...the Cutting Begins, editor Ralph Rosenblum describes how the scene
in Annie Hall where Woody Allen
sneezes on the cocaine attracted a much greater laugh than anyone expected, so
that in preview screenings the opening dialogue from the next scene was drowned
out by laughter. To solve that problem, the editor added in more and more static
reaction time at the end of the cocaine scene. It’s about fixing a problem, but
inextricably bound to the film’s aesthetic impact. Just a few frames may make
the difference between poignancy and mawkishness; comic elegance and something we
recoil from for being shoved in our faces; revelation and obviousness. When
this is well executed we don’t even notice, and the accomplished editor would
surely be proud of that.

I really wish I liked David O. Russell’s new film Silver Linings Playbook as much as The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis did. Stamping
it in her opening sentence as a film that “does almost everything right,” she goes
on to talk about Russell as “a virtuoso of chaos, (with) supreme command
over a movie that regularly feels as if it’s teetering on the edge of hysteria,
in respect to the characters and director both...Like a singer who quavers
tauntingly, thrillingly close to going off-key, Mr. Russell never loses
control. Watching him pull back from the brink can be a delight.” Actually,
something similar might be said of Dargis’ review, a wonderful mini-essay, even
if potentially over the top (it cites both Robert Frost and Samuel Beckett): as
I read it, I was completely persuaded of Silver
Linings Playbook’s greatness. Until I remembered that I’d actually seen the
picture, and didn’t actually agree much at all.

Silver Linings Playbook

Bradley Cooper plays Pat
Solitano, returning to his parents’ house in Philadelphia after eight months in
a mental institution, consumed by the desire to reunite with his wife Nicki,
despite a restraining order and the obstacles of their past history. A
neighbour, Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, in the film’s most varied and
resourceful performance) tells him she can get a letter to Nicki, but demands
in return that he train with her to be her partner in a local dance contest; he
eventually goes along, and as their partnership slowly gels, the human mess
around them (anxious parents, a close friend also trying to claw his way out of
institutions, another who admits to feeling crushed by his outwardly
picture-book life) may also stumble to some shaky equilibrium.

It’s not hard to see why
actors are drawn to working with Russell: he actually gives them something to act – crackling dialogue, largely free
of conventionally writerly ponderousness; exchanges and moods that zig and zag;
multi-faceted human choreography. But this undoubted skill ultimately only
makes the film more intensely disappointing. The first half comes to seem
increasingly monotonous – just one shouting match after another: as Dargis
says, the film may not go off the cliff edge, but you increasingly wonder why
we’re always standing so close to the cliff edge in the first place. The second
half calms down, but becomes increasingly dependent on unconvincing set pieces
involving the dance contest, and Eagles games, and a quasi-mystical melding of
the two. When it reaches the inevitable happy ending, it feels largely like
something the film collapses into, as if out of exhaustion.

The movie (which won the People’s Choice award at this
year’s Toronto festival) is certainly more satisfying than not, and I never
found it actively off-putting in the way of Russell’s last film The Fighter, which I could hardly stand
watching at times. But just as The
Fighter had the sense of being created by a
bunch of rich people flattering themselves on doing something important, Silver Linings Playbook feels like a movie
where no one ever forgot they got to go back to the hotel at night. In
contrast, at various points I found myself thinking of the French director Arnaud
Desplechin, whose most recent film A
Christmas Tale has some similarities
with Russell’s movie – a dysfunctional family congregating around a big house,
a seriously challenging son, and more.

Russell and Desplechin

But Desplechin by comparison makes Russell feel like someone
relentlessly pedaling a bike that’s nailed to the spot – the volume of
doublings and contrasts and echoes and conflicts in his film is almost beyond
processing, but always feels like the natural expression of a fully-formed, thrillingly
expansive worldview. And to cite a small yet meaningful example - when
Desplechin’s characters discuss a book, as they often do, there’s no doubt
they’ve read the book. Silver Linings Playbook also cites
literature a few times, but only in terms that might have been skimmed off a
Wikipedia summary. Overall, being a virtuoso of chaos (if we concede the title)
obviously isn’t a negligible achievement, but it threatens to severely limit
how far your films can ultimately travel (Dargis refers to Russell’s “belief in joyous, transporting cinema,” but I think that’s mainly true in
the sense that if you shove people into a deep hole, it’s joyous even just to watch
them claw their way back to the surface). Desplechin has as keen a sense of our
earthly chains, but also possesses a much more fully evolved sense of
transcendent possibility, and navigates gorgeously between the two.

It may seem odd to spend so much time reviewing Silver Linings Playbook by writing about
a completely different filmmaker (although I guess it’s not the first time I’ve
done that). But every two hours we spend watching a film is two hours we’re not
spending on another one. Dargis’ image of Russell as a singer
who threatens to go off-key evokes the fun of watching something like American Idol, and I guess it’s a fact
that a lot of people would rather watch talented amateurs than accomplished
professionals. But isn’t that just another sign of our collective comfort with
mediocrity?

Skyfall

I’ve written here before about the wonderful moment on the
DVD of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent,
where the old master praises the early 80’s Bond film For Your Eyes Only for its “cinematic writing,” an assessment
seemingly only explicable by assuming Bresson had hardly ever seen a mainstream
action movie, and was able to view it with a purity of spirit denied the rest
of us. I thought about this again as I watched the new Bond, Skyfall, which is certainly much more
ably cinematically written than its hopelessly messy predecessor Quantum of Solace (which felt more like
paint hurled against a wall), and sometimes approaches a rather beautiful
abstraction, as in the nighttime lights and reflections of a sequence in Shanghai,
or the opening chase sequence’s gorgeously precise excesses. Taken as a whole,
director Sam Mendes restores something here of the series’ classic essence, but
this only shows how meaningless that essence has become. The plot (about Bond
on the trail of a master criminal seemingly intent on destroying British covert
operations in general, and spymaster M in particular) turns on large doses of
pain and brooding, and posits that we have more to fear now from the chaotic
shadows cast by anguish and personal trauma than from grand schemes to take
over the world; unfortunately though, everything about Bond is coded for a time
when power relations (including, of course, those of the sexual kind) carried
greater certainty. Still, there’s a lot to enjoy in there, not least of course
the usual virtuosity of chaos.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men is one of the
year’s most acclaimed movies. A. O. Scott in The New York Times referred to “the deep satisfaction that comes
from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task,” and as I
write, the picture is the favourite to win the best picture Oscar on a “Gurus
of Gold” web site. And I can see that – it’s extraordinarily precise and
sustained.

No Country for Old Men

Based on a novel by Cormac
McCarthy, it has some of the most striking dialogue of the year, perfectly
delivered by an ideal cast. It also makes memorable use of silence and space,
from wide-open Texas landscapes to claustrophobically menacing motel rooms. The
Coens’ famous imagination and flair is evident throughout, in their approach to
character, in their editing and staging choices – as the film goes on, their
assurance shows in choices that no other directors would likely make.

Did anyone fail to see a “but”
arriving at the end of that? Yeah, I don’t really like the film that much. The
litmus test for me might be the character of Anton Chigurh, played by Javier
Bardem. He's a dedicated sociopathic killer, racking up over a dozen bodies I
think in the movie’s course, while on the trail of some $2 million in missing
money. His quarry is Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a regular trailer park guy
who happened on the scene of a bloody shoot-out and made off with the spoils
(not realizing that the bag containing the money also hides an electronic
locator). Tommy Lee Jones is the local sheriff, appalled at the evil that men
do and doubting his own capacity to stand much more of it.

Bardem is another emerging
Oscar favourite – like Anthony Hopkins in The
Silence of the Lambs, he creates a wildly distinctive variation on conventional
nightmares. But Chigurh doesn’t evolve one iota from his first scene to his
last. He starts off like the worst thing you’ve ever seen, and the main thesis
on the character is that he goes on that way, long after any conventional
sleazebag would have called it a day (there’s some entertaining, and quite
persuasive, argument on the web that Chigurh is ultimately best viewed as
supernatural).

This is amusing in the
blackest of ways, but I wonder how excited anyone should get over so abstract a
concept. As I’ve said before, hitmen, serial killers and their ilk are the most
over-represented profession in movies, and I have trouble taking seriously any
director who still traffics in this stuff. As a current contrast, Philip
Seymour Hoffman in Sidney Lumet’s Before the
Devil Knows You’re Dead becomes almost as monstrous, but he doesn’t start
out that way, and his trajectory (within the parameters of movie conventions)
is fascinating as a moral tale on the price of hubris.

Going Downhill

No
Country for Old Men
of course doesn’t just create this terrible individual for the hell of it. Near
the end, Jones and another sheriff ruminate on coarsening times (it’s set in
1980), on kids with “bones through their noses”: it started going downhill,
says Jones, when people stopped saying “sir” and “ma’am.” This, for sure, is a
valid theme for great filmmakers – not that we’d be better off going back to
those traditional modes, but certainly the gulf between the glitzy surface of
modern culture and the underlying trends and exposures is frightening, and it’s
continuing to escalate no matter how many “green issues” of glossy magazines
we’re presented with.

However, the prevalence of
small-town bloodbaths triggered by single-minded psychos is a singularly
unhelpful way of getting at this theme. The film never flags as a narrative
machine, but becomes increasingly repetitive and borderline boring as anything
more than that. Jones’ mournfulness is well-played, but starts to feel like an
affectation, and the movie keeps adding on more and more scenes that seem like
endings, as if caught in some kind of existential headlights. I came out with
respectful admiration, but limited enthusiasm, and even that’s dwindled over
the twenty-four hours since then.

I’ve been in this place with
the Coens before. I’ve seen all the movies, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any of
them more than once (maybe Fargo, but
I don’t think the repeat investment paid off) and I’m straining to cite one
truly interesting or provocative thing I ever learned from any of them. I guess
maybe I learned a bit about how people talk in Minnesota, so that’s something.

I’m Not There

Todd Haynes is another
much-admired American director, although his reputation is more of a niche
thing. His new I’m Not There isn’t calculated
to change that – it’s as deliberate a head-scratcher as anyone’s come up with
recently. A meditation on the life of Bob Dylan, represented by six different
actors playing different versions (or evocations) of the man at different
points in his life (or different extrapolations of his myth), poetically
intertwined and juxtaposed.

It’s quite stunningly
achieved. It’s not hard to grasp the basic point, that Dylan the man is the
least significant thing about “Dylan” the influence – after forty five years in
the eye of popular culture, he’s spawned more images and impacts and shifts and
consequences than can ever be pulled back together. Dylan isn’t black of
course, and isn’t a reincarnation of Billy The Kid and so forth, but those
influences live in his immense historical footprint; at once playful and highly
rigorous, Haynes’ film is like unwrapping DNA, throwing in some viruses and
filigree, and throwing it into a display case where it continually
half-reassembles itself while half -mutating into something else.

This movie is also tipped for
an acting Oscar, for Cate Blanchett’s work as Dylan in his Don’t Look Back period. It’s a fine performance, but I got into the
concept enough to wish it had gone a step further, with Blanchett simply
portraying Dylan as a woman. No matter. Haynes executes this project with
enormous panache – it’s immensely visually and tonally varied (from pseudo
documentary to utter poetic association), a constant tumble of allusion and
connection. Sometimes it’s a bit gimmicky of course, but even when you don’t
understand some of Haynes’ choices – such as the relative time devoted to the
marital squabbling of Heath Ledger’s incarnation and his French wife – they’re
intriguingly executed and thematically provocative within the overall scheme.

Of course, I suppose you could
say that the nature of celebrity is even more over-examined in movies than the
nature of evil – and that’s true, but not in this way. The Coens could make a
nuanced and distinctive movie about Bob Dylan, no doubt, but at its heart would
be someone doing a really good impersonation of him for two hours, with maybe a
secondary character (perhaps played by Tommy Lee Jones) delivering beautifully
written, soulful elegies about the meaning of it all. I’d go to see it, and
afterwards I’d shrug and move on.

Writing
in The New York Times about Steven
Spielberg’s Lincoln, David Brooks
said: “The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way. It
shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end
slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things
only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others —
if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and
hypocritical…The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high
vision and low cunning.”

Lincoln and Ford

Now,
I saw Lincoln in the same week that
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was booted out of office (I know, I know, it’s the
ultimate bastardization of good taste to cite Abraham Lincoln and Rob Ford in
the same sentence) and I couldn’t help engaging in the absurdist mental
exercise of applying Brooks’ comments to our wretched, uh, leader (given the
ongoing appeal process, I can’t quite yet commit to saying ex-leader, much as
I’d like to). Ford is certainly a hypocritical bamboozler of stained character,
but the issue of “willingness” is beside the point – he’s driven entirely by
his narrow, gloatingly ignorant instincts, which some see as a mark of
authenticity.

I
suppose he’s sincere about “respect for taxpayers,” insofar as he perceives the
phrase (there’s little evidence that Ford’s understanding of common terms
corresponds to that of normally literate people), but he lacks any useful sense
of political power as a commodity that can be shaped and managed and deployed.
What most offends about his obsession with his football team is that he
honestly thinks it’s virtuous to spend a big chunk of his time on that tiny
number of “kids,” even though he’s sought and obtained power over and
responsibility for the well-being of several million people: it sums up a
failure of perception and applied morality that, in his circumstances, makes
him simply odious.

Equality in all things

Anyway,
Lincoln focuses on the President’s efforts, early in his second term, with the
Civil War in its death throes, to pass his proposed 13th Amendment
to the Constitution, formally abolishing slavery. With Senate approval already
obtained, success or failure comes down to the House of Representatives, and
specifically on winning over a number of the lame-duck Democrats who initially
oppose the bill. Some of the Amendment’s supporters do so as a matter of
principle, others because they see it as a lever to ending the war; some advocate
waiting for peacetime, but Lincoln believes the issue of slavery must be
settled before post-war reconstruction. This mass of conflicting motives and
perspectives creates the backdrop for what Brooks describes, where achieving
this worthiest of goals depends on a wide array of tricks and tactics, some of
them only ethical with reference to a calculation of the ends justifying the
means.

One
of the film’s key moments in this regard comes when a key ally of Lincoln’s
stands up on the House floor to deny his deeply-held belief in racial equality,
knowing that the bill’s success depends on sticking to softer rhetoric. “I do
not hold in equality in all things, only in equality before the law,” he
repeats, and when his opponents accuse him of lying, he explodes at them,
asking (in volcanically colourful terms) how he could possibly believe in the
equality of all things, when faced with people who constitute the lowest
possible examples of mankind. In such scenes, Lincoln is simultaneously at its most entertaining and most morally
complex, illustrating the murky nature of expressed “truth” and its
intertwining with strategy and positioning. Some have found the film somewhat
boring, but I was riveted by it throughout.

As
you can see though, and in common it seems with many political commentators,
I’m taken by it largely for its effectiveness as a critical reference point for
our own times. That’s not necessarily a major qualification – there seems to me
little point in watching any movie
about the past, except insofar as it may in some way inform our present. But as
a study of Abraham Lincoln, the film seems constantly hampered by Spielberg’s
adherence to the Great Man approach to history. True, he largely avoids the
epic trappings of battlefields and grand vistas – one of the film’s most
appealing qualities is its intimacy, its depiction of a Presidency much more
closely rooted in the streets and the people than we’ll ever see again. But the
film frequently feels more interested in creating handsomely iconic moments
than in trying to convey the texture of a real time and place. As Jonathan
Rosenbaum put it: “Surely Lincoln and his cohorts didn’t experience their
everyday surroundings as if they were silhouettes in a pretentiously
underlighted art movie, but this Lincoln and these cohorts do.” Also, I’ve
almost never mentioned a film’s music in any of my articles here, but the fact
that I was distractingly aware at several points of John Williams’ score for Lincoln didn’t work to the film’s
benefit.

Terrible things

For similar reasons,
I’m a bit less sure about Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Lincoln than the
consensus (which has basically already given him the Oscar) would have it.
Day-Lewis certainly seems like the Lincoln we’ve always been waiting to see on
the screen, but did the real man really behave as if Doris Kearns Goodwin was
lying in wait at every moment? In this regard I’d agree with Rosenbaum again
that “Spielberg’s storytelling gifts…often depend on a ruthless catering to
what we already think we know about a given subject.” At various points I
wished the film had been made instead by someone with a greater relish for
chaos and productive myth, like the late Robert Altman: it wouldno doubt have been odder and harder to
follow, but would also have been less of a pre-judged tribute, more of a true
exploration.

Still,
the film is much stronger than Spielberg’s entirely pointless version of War Horse, full of fascinating moments,
and conveying something viscerally compelling about the darkness at the heart
of America in those times, and the despair in Lincoln’s own heart. “We’ve made
it possible for one another to do terrible things,” he says to General Grant
near the end, expressing Brooks’ point at its extreme, how leadership requires
embracing cruelty far beyond the parameters of normal life. Obama has seen the
film, and views it, according to his press secretary as “both an excellent movie
and a vivid reminder that our 16th president was not just a brilliant orator
and statesman but a masterful politician.” Going back to the terrible things we’ve done, one might counsel Rob Ford
to see the film, and yet there seems little chance of him being able to follow
it even on a cursory level, let alone extracting any higher insight from it.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Mike Binder’s Reign over Me
is a big shambling mass of 9/11 survivor guilt, mixed in with multiple brands
of new age male neurosis and sloppy fantasy; it’s always watchable but never
completely persuasive. Don Cheadle plays Johnson, a dentist, coasting along
with his wife and two daughters. He runs into his old college roommate Charlie,
played by Adam Sandler, a man who dropped from sight after his wife and three
girls were killed on one of the planes. Charlie’s so out of it that he doesn’t
even recognize his former best friend (or claims not to at least – the
character’s psychological state varies a bit depending on the demands of
individual scenes); he spends his time in a regressive (although well-financed)
state of adolescent self-absorption, playing video games, collecting vinyl and
jamming in a band, watching movies and riding around town on a motor scooter.
Johnson gets through to him and rapidly starts spending more and more of his
time in “Charlie world,” which creates friction at home. But Charlie is plainly
unstable – sometimes he explodes in anger and his heart is emptier than he can
bear. Johnson must lead him back, if he can only coax Charlie to confront his
pain.

Earthly Tragedy

The film presents a rich, enveloping vision of New York, and seems
most comfortable when it’s just about guys hanging out together. Binder
confines Jada Pinkett Smith, as Johnson’s wife, to the role of brittle ball
buster, but throws in alternate diversions that seem like the stuff of late
night dreams – Saffron Burrows as a woman obsessed with the dentist, and Liv
Tyler as a gentle psychiatrist. Burrows’ character seems almost as screwed up
as Sandler’s, but Binder doesn’t take much care with her, creating the distinct
impression that grand, dramatic suffering is a male enclave (there’s barely a
person in the film who’s not hurting in one way or another though). Johnson’s
languishing too of course, and Charlie motivates him to be more assertive to
his condescending partners, and in the end to better focus on things at home.

Like Binder’s last release The
Upside of Anger (which had Joan Allen as a mother of four daughters, also
going off the deep end after her husband abandons her), Reign over Me has epic ambition, but sometimes faltering execution
– both films feel at times as if the director merely shoots anything that
passes through his head. That does give them a distinctive, sometimes affecting
contour – the new film feels like honest testimony of some kind, even if its
broader applicability seems inherently questionable. Sandler is fairly
effective, but his character seems unmoored to any earthly tragedy, let alone
9/11: he’s a creation of the Id, a variation on the holy fool, spawning from
the popular culture with which he crams his existence.

I Think I Love My
Wife

In search for alternate points of entry into the battered modern
male psyche, Chris Rock reaches back into Eric Rohmer’s movie from the early
70’s, Love in the Afternoon (also
known as Chloe in the Afternoon). Now
called I Think I Love my Wife, in its
bare bones it’s a surprisingly faithful adaptation, as restlessly married
businessman Rock runs into the sexy ex-girlfriend of an old buddy, and starts
to hang out with her way more than he should, imperiling both his home and work
life, even though nothing actually happens.
Kerry Washington’s Nicki is an outstandingly plausible piece of sheer trouble,
investing the film with an energy it otherwise lacks.

Which isn’t to say it’s without interest. Sporting a nerdy
moustache, Rock inhabits an unprepossessing put-upon mode, and seems to be
severely rationing his film’s outright laughs; even when he includes (say) a
broad (distinctly un-Rohmer like) set piece involving a Viagra overdose,
there’s a rather desperate, pinched quality to things which well suits the
basic premise. This doesn’t go anywhere unfortunately – the relationship with
his wife is underdeveloped (never giving him an inch, she belongs in a club
with the Jada Pinkett Smith character), and the very premise (revolving around
Rock’s habits of taking lunch at 2 in the afternoon) doesn’t work as well in
the contemporary corporate world as it did in more genteel 70’s France. Still,
it’s an interesting enough project. By the way, the firm where Rock works is
called Pupkin and Langford, an apparent nod to the two protagonists of Martin
Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy.
Perhaps his character’s unfulfilled compulsive fantasizing has some broad
kinship with De Niro’s Pupkin, but the reference doesn’t really do Rock’s film
any favours. And what film could possibly synthesize both Rohmer and Scorsese
as guiding spirits?

The Host

The Host is an entertaining monster movie from South
Korea. An arrogantly careless American scientist orders that vast amounts of
unwanted formaldehyde be poured down the sink, and four years later the local
river has spawned a mutant giant carnivorous fish that leaps out of the water,
scoops up the locals, and plunges back into the depths. A dysfunctional family
comes together when the monster carries a young girl away; then she calls them
on a cell – she’s still alive, and they have to get to her. The trouble is,
they’ve been quarantined for a suspected virus carried by the beast – they bust
out, and have the whole city after them.

I’m not sure the film is quite as scintillating as some of the
more rapturous reviews suggest, but it’s never dull and never merely
functional. The conception of the mutant is gleefully absurd, but the intrigue
over the virus is distinctly reminiscent of pre-Iraq WMD talk; America takes a
restrained but firm drubbing here. The family dynamics are worked out with
unusual care, and director Bong Joon-ho’s use of comedy and excess is quite
audacious at times. It has the narrative craziness typical of the genre, but
also some unexpected tragedy. Overall The
Host is satisfyingly intelligent viewing that never gets stuffy or
pretentious about its genre, with an unusually genial authorial voice.

The Lookout is the directorial debut of noted
screenwriter Scott Frank, who wrote Out of
Sight and Get Shorty. This too is
a somewhat old-fashioned thriller, notable for its scrupulous internal logic
and for its immersion in its protagonist’s psychology. He’s played by Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, again intriguingly vulnerable as a former golden boy rendered
mentally fallible by a tragic accident; he relies on a series of notes and cues
to get through his day, attending a skills training centre by day and
janitoring at a rural bank by night. His weakness, and frustration at his
diminished prospects, makes him an easy mark for a gang that’s been eyeing up
the vault.

It’s a deliberately placed movie – even the higher-octane closing
stretch is quite low-key by contemporary standards – and it’s intriguing for
how the character must battle himself almost as much as the violent adversaries
(several critics have cited Memento,
although The Lookout is quite a bit
less involved and taxing). It’s hard to be effusive about Frank’s film – it
feels as if, first time out, he wanted to lay a modest bet, bring home a small
but well-played pot, and save the real effort for next time. Even the title
feels kind of modest, if you know what I mean.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).